Lord of the Ants

Naturalist E.O. Wilson's fascination with little creatures has led him to some very big ideas.
Airing May 20, 2008 at 9 pm on PBS
Aired May 20, 2008 on PBS

Program Description

(Program not available for streaming.) At age 78, E.O. Wilson is still going through his "little savage" phase of boyhood exploration of the natural world. In "Lord of the Ants," NOVA profiles this soft-spoken Southerner and Harvard professor, who is an acclaimed advocate for ants, biological diversity, and the controversial extension of Darwinian ideas to human society.

Actor and environmentalist Harrison Ford narrates this engaging portrait of a ceaselessly active scientist and eloquent writer, who has accumulated two Pulitzer Prizes among his many other honors. Says fellow naturalist David Attenborough: "He will go down as the man who opened the eyes of millions 'round the world to the glories, the values, the importance of—to use his term—biodiversity."

Transcript

Lord of the Ants

PBS Air date: May 20, 2008

NARRATOR: Every so often, a giant emerges on the stage of
science, someone who transcends the narrow boundaries of a particular line of
research and alters our perspective of the world. Ed Wilson is such a man. His
early fascination with ants launched a dazzling scientific career that led him
to lift his eyes from the ground to explain the grand scheme of life itself.

When
he wrote his book Sociobiology,
tracing the origins of animal social behavior from ants to humans, he had
little idea of the controversy it would trigger. Not since Charles
Darwin's The Origin of Species
has evolutionary biology caused such heated debate.

Undeterred
by the furor, he went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Today, he
campaigns for biodiversity and fights to conserve the world's endangered
species.

Tonight
on NOVA: Lord of the Ants.

Major funding for NOVA is provided by David H.
Koch. And...

Discovering new knowledge: HHMI.

Major funding for Lord of the Ants is provided by the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund.
Additional funding is provided by Gordon and Betty Moore and by the Invitrogen
Educational Foundation. And by the following.

Major Funding for NOVA is also provided by the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by PBS viewers like you. Thank you.

NARRATOR: Ed Wilson believes human beings have an
instinctive affinity for living things. He even invented a word for it:
"biophilia." It's what draws us to places like Central Park.

He
also knows that human activity is a threat to life's incredible
diversity. To monitor what's happening, these volunteers are taking part
in a 24-hour "bio-blitz," an audit of every living species in the
park. Wilson is a pioneer of this activity. He encourages others to do what
he's always done, to embrace the natural world.

VOLUNTEER: ...small,
gray swirl in here as well.

EDWARD
O. WILSON (E.O. Wilson Biodiversity
Foundation): Now, I want you to
notice what appears to be, to you, just a flat surface, right? But this is not
a flat surface to most of life on Earth. This is three-dimensional. We are sort
of like the Godzillas of the world. We're gigantic organisms and we walk,
crunch across this world like Godzilla over New York. But if you started
digging down, you would see that you are passing through numerous layers of
different microenvironments.

NARRATOR: Beneath the leaves, he imagines a subterranean
labyrinth inhabited by micromonsters. An orabitid mite feeds off a fungal
thread. A millipede is a lumbering giant in this world; tiny mites can hitch a
ride on its back.

Most
of life on Earth is smaller than the eye can see. The soil contains thousands
of different bacteria. Many are exotic species still unknown to science.

ED
WILSON: And that's how so much of the diversity is
created in an actual environment like this. It's at your feet. You never
see it, but it's here.

NARRATOR: But the creature that has inspired Ed Wilson
throughout his life is one of the most abundant and highly organized insects on
the planet: the ant.

ED
WILSON: Here is a nest of the infamous fire ant, a mound
nest of something... with something like 200,000 vicious stinging little
workers in it. And I'm going to demonstrate, now, why it's called
the fire ant.

Now,
don't do this at home. First, I'll scrape this off and get them
coming up. And pretty soon those ants are boiling out of there, fighting mad. They're
ready to sting and defeat any enemy that comes in, and I'm going to make
myself the enemy just for a few seconds. So here we go.

All
right, now, if you look, you'll see a lot of them beginning to pause and
sting my hand. Each one of those stings feels like the touch of a hot needle. And
now, pardon me. I'm going to get rid of these ants in a hurry.

MAN: Is it a chemical?

ED
WILSON: Yeah, it's a small molecule of venom. It is
rough; my hand feels like it's on fire! I hope it'll go away, too. And
I've done this, but not quite to that extent before. Okay.

SIR
DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Ed Wilson is a magic
name to many of us working in the natural world, for two reasons. First, he is
a towering example of a specialist, a world authority. Nobody in the world has
ever known as much as Ed Wilson about ants. But, in addition to that intense
knowledge and understanding, he has the widest of pictures. He sees the planet
and the natural world that it contains in amazing detail but extraordinary
coherence.

NARRATOR: He's a scientist with over 400 published
papers, but he writes like a poet. What sets him apart is his unified picture
of life. He explores the continuum that extends from subatomic particles and
chemical interactions to consciousness and culture.

The
wellspring for this unity of knowledge began with his boyhood adventures in
Alabama. Nature soon cast an everlasting spell.

ED
WILSON: I had the great good fortune of spending a large
part of my boyhood wandering through beautiful mixed woods of south Alabama. You
can see it's still rich in living creatures that I soon was picking up on,
looking at every frog and lizard and kinds of plants and then insects that I
could find.

I
got a lot of indirect encouragement from my parents, mainly because they gave
me freedom. They didn't mind that I was going through what I like to call
my "little savage" period.

Well,
I'm now grown up. I'm still, basically, a boy. But I'm a
grown up naturalist now, and it takes a little effort for me to realize that I,
and people like me, see the world in a different way from others. I see it as a
universe of immense diversity.

NARRATOR: Ed Wilson's imagination thrives on chance
discoveries. As a child he was always on the lookout for strange life forms.

ED
WILSON: One day I saw a large jellyfish. I tried to figure
out where it came from and what it was all about and why it was there.

A
little boy, I think, has an automatic interest in monsters. In my little boy's
mind, I then saw the sea as something of great mystery—of alien purpose
and dark happenings—and wanted to know more.

NARRATOR: But a cruel act of fate would determine his
future as a naturalist. Like many boys, he had a passion for fishing.

ED
WILSON: One of my favorites was the pinfish, which has these
sharp spines in the dorsal fin. Easy to catch, but I was enthusiastically
yanking them up out of the water, one after the other, when one accidentally
came in...the spine hit me in the eye. I subsequently became blind in that eye;
but that, combined with my inability to hear very well in the upper register,
so I can't hear bird song, meant that, well, I sure wasn't going to
be an expert on birds when I got older. So I turned kind of automatically to
looking at little things that I can see holding between my thumb and forefinger—insects
and other small creatures. And I became an entomologist, a student of insects.

There's
the question of, why did I pick ants, you know? Why not butterflies or
whatever? And the answer is that they're so abundant, they're easy
to find, and they're easy to study, and they're so interesting. They
have social habits that differ from one kind of ant to the next. You know, each
kind of ant has almost the equivalent of a different human culture. So each
species is a wonderful object to study in itself. In fact, I honestly can't...cannot
understand why most people don't study ants.

NARRATOR: By choosing an insect with so many different
species and such highly organized societies, he had unwittingly set off down a
path that would determine his own evolution as a biologist.

At
the age of 13, he was the first person to identify a new invasive species in
Alabama—the red fire ant from South America. Later, when he was still in
college, the state of Alabama asked him to write a report on the fire ant
invasion.

In
1951, he came to study at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, and
he's been there ever since.

The
museum houses one of the biggest collections of beetles and ants in the world.
For Ed Wilson this was paradise. He was fascinated by the vast diversity of
species available to him.

ED
WILSON: In 1953, I had the opportunity to begin serious
travel anywhere I wanted to go in the world and told to do something
outstanding. So what I did was to head out for the tropics—Mexico, Cuba—and
then to the great island systems of the South Pacific: to New Caledonia and New
Guinea.

NARRATOR: For three years, he traveled around the world,
collecting specimens from tropical islands, just as Charles Darwin had done in
his early twenties.

Today,
Ed Wilson is visiting a cloud forest high in the Dominican Republic.

ED
WILSON: Oh, wow, look at that.

MAN: What have you got?

ED
WILSON: That's my genus!

MAN:
Pheidole?

ED
WILSON: Yeah. I've got to get a lot of these. Hold on.

NARRATOR: For decades, he's been collecting ants from
one particular genus, a group of closely-related species called Pheidole.

ED
WILSON: Oh, yes, and not a little one either. Look at the
size of this thing. I don't know how we could have missed this before. It's
a big ant. Great!

MAN: That's entomology!

MAN:
We should get a DNA bar code for that.

ED
WILSON: Why not? Beautiful, just beautiful.

It's
amazing that about 20 percent of all of the known ant species from the western
hemisphere belong to this genus. It's a genus that's characterized
by having little skinny workers. But then, in addition, it has great big
soldiers that do the fighting. And I have a soldier here, and that's the
one that has the most traits that you look at in order to tell one species from
another.

Among
the traits are these little striation, or scratches, on the head of the soldier,
so this part being completely shiny, and then the smooth outline of this part
of the body, and the shape and the length of this little spine that it's
got back here.

What's
really interesting about this, you know, besides finding something completely
new in nature—species that may have been there a million years—is
that, gradually, we see patterns of distribution, you know? Certain kinds of
species are found in certain habitats and others are found on different islands.
And then, from that information, comes more and more certain knowledge about
how these species of insects, in this case, ants, got there in the first place.

NARRATOR: Ed Wilson has discovered 344 of over 600
identified species in this single genus, Pheidole. It took over two decades to
identify and compile all the specimens that make up this tombstone of a book.
He drew each of the 5,000 meticulous illustrations himself. This is the
culmination of a lifetime's devotion to ants.

When
he returned from his island adventures in the mid-'50s, he brought back
hundreds of specimens to add to Harvard's collection.

But
the intrepid naturalist was about to have a rude awakening. The structure of
DNA had just been discovered, and a new era of biology, decoding the chemistry
of genes, was about to begin. Many molecular biologists dismissed Ed
Wilson's approach as "stamp collecting."

Leading
the charge at Harvard was the newly appointed James Watson who, with Francis
Crick, had deciphered the structure of DNA.

ED
WILSON: Well, Jim Watson was a difficult person. He himself
says that. He was rather rude. I described him as a "Caligula of biology"
and—in my memoir—and "the most disagreeable person I'd
ever met to that time," and so on. And yet I admired enormously his
achievement, and I wanted to try or encourage achievements similar to that in evolutionary environmental
biology.

NARRATOR: Much later, they became friends, but even while
they were enemies, Watson inspired Wilson to use chemistry to unravel complex
evolutionary problems, such as how ants coordinate their activities.

Was
an ant colony like a giant super-organism with a collective brain? How did
individual ants communicate? Was it learned or was it coded in their genes?

ED
WILSON: I started thinking about how I would find the key to
turn the lock and open up the code by which ants speak. It couldn't be a
sound like a birdsong. It couldn't be vision. It had to be something
else. Ants can't see very well. They can't hear very well. Of
course it had to be chemical.

NARRATOR: He devised an artificial nest with Plexiglas®
chambers and galleries, so he could observe the behavior of ants in a colony.
The breakthrough came when he noticed the ants laid an invisible trail as they
searched for food. He was about to decipher the chemical language of ants.

ED
WILSON: What I'm doing in this experiment, out here in
the field with a fire ant colony, is putting baits on a blank piece of paper,
one next to the colony itself and then another bait at the end of our little
platform of paper, a little distance from the nest so the ants can't find
it right away. What I'm doing, here, is holding a fire ant that I've
just taken out of the nest, and I'm going to squeeze the rear end of the
abdomen—where the sting is—that contains the trail substance that
the ants use to lay down on the ground and guide other fire ants to food and
new places for nesting. And I'm going to duplicate this by just taking
out some of that material from the rear end of the ant, and then I'm
going to lay my own trail and talk to the ants to lead them to where I want
them to go. And beginning to work, and yes, it's going to work.

And
now, just a few minutes later, after I laid my trail, the ants themselves are
laying their trail on top of that, and the result is a very strong trail. And
quite a few ants now are going back and forth. And they'll do that for
hours, until they collect all that food.

Examples
besides the trail substance include alarm; they can signal one another that
there's danger, and some ants can even signal what the danger is, which
kind of an enemy it is. There are signals that tell other ants about a new nest
site, you know, "where we don't... this is not such a hot dig, so
we'll go somewhere else." And then there are signals that indicate
what caste you belong to, you know, like, "Hey, I'm a queen, you
know. Take care of me. I lay the eggs around here."

And
gradually, with chemists and biologists working together, we've worked
out this vocabulary. In the case of fire ants, we found that they talk with
between 10 and 20 of these signals. My favorite find was how ants tell us that
a fellow ant is dead. It's not enough for the ant to be lying still with
his legs sticking up in the air. It has to have a certain decomposition
substance that it only gets after a couple of days. That turns out to be oleic
acid. Well, you can put oleic acid on a perfectly healthy ant and the other
ants will take it out and dump it in the refuse pile. And it stays there until
it cleans itself off and then rejoins the living.

This
study of ants has shed a lot of light on how animals generally communicate by
chemicals. And we now know that most kinds of animals do most of their
communication with pheromones, talking with the use of chemicals that they
taste and smell.

NARRATOR: Ed Wilson realized that the code for the
chemicals that determined the ants' behavior must be written in their
genes. If this were true for ants, then perhaps the behavior of other animals
might also have a genetic basis.

DAVID
ATTENBOROUGH: The remarkable thing about
him, about him, it seems to me, is that, not only does he do these acute
studies and penetrating studies of a small group of insects, but he is able to
step back, not just one pace but three paces, and see the entire panorama of,
not just invertebrates but vertebrates, of the whole magic complex web of
organisms, animals and plants.

NARRATOR: Ed Wilson set himself a daunting task: to
investigate the origins of all animal behavior, from ants to monkeys, right
through to the most social of all primates, humans. He even invented a name for
this new discipline: "sociobiology."

When
he set out on this intellectual adventure, he had little idea of the trouble
that lay ahead. The seed for this vision had been planted many years before, in
1956, when he visited a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico. What he
witnessed here would change his view of life forever.

Fifty
years later, he is returning to the place the locals call Monkey Island with
his former Ph.D. student, Stuart Altmann.

ED
WILSON: The first rule that I learned from you was don't
look at them. That is, I should say, don't stare at them.

STUART
ALTMANN (Princeton University): Don't stare at them. A direct stare to them
is a threat.

ED
WILSON: Oh yes, I learned that!

STUART
ALTMANN: The hard way.

ED
WILSON: That's right.

NARRATOR: The island is home to over 900 rhesus macaques.
They were introduced here, from India, in the 1930s, to provide a breeding
colony for medical research.

For
Stuart Altmann, these monkeys offered a unique opportunity to study the social
behavior of free living primates. This was a new kind of field research, rarely
attempted before, so he had trouble finding someone to supervise his Ph.D. at
Harvard, until he was told about a young entomologist.

STUART
ALTMANN: "There's this guy, Ed
Wilson, who's a junior fellow at Harvard now, but he'll...95
percent sure he'll be a faculty member next year. Go talk to him." And
I did. And Ed and I hit it off immediately. And it didn't take us very
long to come to the realization that the two of us were respectively studying
ants and primates, were studying the two groups of organisms that have the most
complex social systems in the animal kingdom. The question was, are there some
commonalities that would lead one to say, "Well, possibly, one could have
a unified theory of animal social systems?"

She's got a nasty old wound there...

ED
WILSON: Yeah, I see that.

STUART
ALTMANN: ...on the right flank. Wonder
what did that? Looks like she's got a swelling under there. I wonder if
it's abscessed.

ED
WILSON: It could be. Look at this. Now here's a case
where this guy is picking around that wound, see? And it looks like he might be
ready to clean that wound. So we're getting a little bit of monkey
medicine going on there.

STUART
ALTMANN: They do.

ED
WILSON: They have a propensity to, you know, to groom and
pick out skin and extra tissue. He's been removing some of the source of
the infection?

STUART
ALTMANN: Presumably so, yeah.

ED
WILSON: Yeah, that's right, yeah. That's
interesting.

STUART
ALTMANN: The males sometimes do what we
call pump priming. They'll go over to a female, groom her very vigorously
for a few minutes, a few seconds sometimes, and then present for grooming and
expect a half hour's worth of reciprocity. You scratch my back and I'll
scratch yours.

ED
WILSON: Literally.

NARRATOR: Field studies like this revealed the complex
behavior of non-human primates. When he was here in the '50s, Ed Wilson
began to make comparisons among insect societies. He found the island was home
to some large termite colonies.

ED
WILSON: That's about as big as they get. Good lord! Now
that is a termite metropolis. If I can get in through the wall with this stick
here—I don't have the proper equipment—we'll see how it's
organized a little bit. If I can't, we'll just get another
instrument. You ready?

STUART
ALTMANN: Here they come.

ED
WILSON: Yeah, okay, here they come, now. The ones that are
coming out now are soldiers. I don't see any of the white workers that
are inside. What's swarming out here are the soldier caste. And what's
really remarkable is you'll notice in this immense thing, there were
soldiers massed here. They didn't know I was going to poke in here. They
are like that all over.

STUART
ALTMANN: So they're in there all the
time.

ED
WILSON: Yeah, they're there all the time, and they're
annoying to me. Now, within a matter of hours, very cautiously, they are going
to be coming out, and they're going to be slowly repairing it, and
building it out and restoring that wall.

They
build the nest out of carton, which is chewed up wood and saliva. Then they
forage down along these covered trails. You can see one along the trunk there.

Oh,
look at this. This must have been broken a little bit earlier...that opening,
which is so precious to the colony because that's the food line where the
termites go to collect food off the floor of the woods. And these soldiers...look
at this. They are not patrolling now. They have pulled in and circled the
wagon. The entire gap is closed with soldiers standing guard.

NARRATOR: It was on this island that Ed Wilson first began
to wrestle with the question of why these creatures acted as they did. Why did
monkeys look after each other's interests? And why would a termite put
itself at risk to protect the nest? This type of altruism did not seem
compatible with the theory of natural selection, where only the fittest
survived.

After
20 years of observing and recording animal behavior in the wild, Ed Wilson
finally published a book, outlining his conclusions, called Sociobiology. But he did not restrict
himself to wildlife. In the final chapter he treated humans as animals,
suggesting genetic traits play a role in our behavior, too. This provoked a
storm of protest.

ED
WILSON: I could not publish this book without including
human. After all, we are...no matter how highly evolved, we are animals. And we
have remarkable similarities, in many ways, to our closest living relatives,
the monkeys and the apes. What I didn't realize at the time was this is a
no-no because most of the social scientists had already come to an agreement,
incorrect as it turns out, that the human brain is a blank slate; that human
behavior, including social behavior, is determined by the accidents of cultural
evolution and by learning, alone; and that there was no such thing, for the
most part, as human nature; that instincts do not exist, except in the most
basic, primitive manner; and the human brain is absolutely unique in this
respect. That was the dogma.

NARRATOR: Back in the '70s, the received wisdom was
that human behavior was a product of how we were reared, a purely environmental
phenomenon. To suggest it was in some way genetically programmed was heresy.

Some
of the fiercest criticism came from Ed Wilson's own department at
Harvard. Richard Lewontin, a leading evolutionary biologist, was one of several
influential scientists who wrote a highly critical letter to the New York Review of Books.

They
feared Wilson's ideas might set the stage for a new kind of eugenics
movement. After all, if bad behavior were a result of bad genes, then perhaps
people might argue for "cleansing" the gene pool.

RICHARD
LEWONTIN (Harvard University): Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology do provide
a kind of justification for certain behaviors, including, not genocide, perhaps,
but certainly eugenics and so on. And I think it's important to point
that out because many people who are eugenicists use genetic determinism as an
argument, saying, "We must do this because the genes have made these
people the way they are, and there's no way to change it. And if this is
bad for society, then we better get rid of this behavior."

BERT
HíLLDOBLER (Arizona State University): I mean, everyone who reads this last chapter cannot
see that Ed pursues a political rightist agenda. This is just ridiculous. Either
they belittle the horror what the Nazi did or they make a monster out of their
colleague and put them in the same line. And this upsets me, even today.

ED
WILSON: I had protestors show up at my lectures in the late '70s.
And, in one case, a group of protesters took over the stage, and they held
banners up condemning sociobiology and condemning me and so on. And I could have...that
would have been okay, I guess, but then one of them dumped a pitcher of ice
water on my head. And I took immediate pride in that. I said...I went on and
gave my talk...while I was getting ready to give my talk, I got it dumped on
me. I said to myself, immediately, "This is interesting and, also, it's
a bit of history to reflect on later. I believe I'm going to be able to
claim that I was the only scientist in modern times to be physically attacked
for an idea."

BERT
HíLLDOBLER: That they disagree with
him, all right. Ed and I, we often disagreed. You know, on human nature, we had
our arguments. But that they didn't come up knocking on Ed's door
and saying, "Ed, we disagree with you," and then discussed it. No,
they launched this unbelievable, horrible, nasty letter.

NARRATOR: Undeterred by these attacks, Ed Wilson continued
to develop his ideas on human sociobiology in another provocative book, On
Human Nature.

Today,
most scientists acknowledge genes play some role in human behavior, but exactly
how genes and the environment interact is still unknown.

The
sociobiology controversy forced Ed Wilson, reluctantly, into the limelight. He
learned to use his celebrity status to alert the world to another passion: his
growing concern about the state of the planet.

ED
WILSON: I realized that I had to be more public. I saw,
clearly, that the world that I loved, the natural world with countless millions
of kinds of plants and animals in it was disappearing, not because people were
deliberately out to destroy the natural world, but because in their own self-interest
they were taking their own part of it and converting it. So one has, in cases
like that, to become an activist and a spokesman.

Sixty-five
million years ago, a mass extinction occurred of life around the planet. Biologists
agree that today we are beginning a new mass extinction, but this time it's
caused by us, by human activity. In order to contribute to the understanding of
just what is occurring, I came down here to the Florida Keys, 40 years ago, to
set up some very miniature mass extinction of my own.

NARRATOR: Back in 1965, Ed Wilson teamed up with a
mathematician-turned-biologist, Daniel Simberloff, to carry out an experiment.
They wanted to work out how the number of species an isolated island could
support depended on the island's size and distance from the mainland.

Using
a mangrove island as a simple model, the plan was to make an inventory of every
living species, and then wipe them all out.

ED
WILSON: We set out to observe the re-colonization, the
rebirth of life, animal life, we didn't want to kill the island; we didn't
want to kill the plants; but we wanted to watch to see what happened. And,
basically, that's how the whole thing got rolling. And now we had to
figure out how to do it.

STEVE
TENDRICH (House Fumigator): One day I received a phone call from Dr. Wilson,
and he said he was from the university of Harvard, wanting to talk to me about
fumigating islands in the Florida Keys. I thought it was a prank call. And I
even said, "I don't have time to...for this stuff. I'm busy,"
you know? But he just kept talking and talking, and finally I said, "Well,
maybe this really is Dr. Wilson." So I said, "Well, I'll try
it, and we'll see what happens."

So
we ended up with a system with a tower in the middle of the island. And, in
turn, we would take these large tents and, and, and put it over this tower and
take guide wires and put sea anchors into the water, and then put the gas in. And
after two hours of fumigation, we'd open up the tents so that the
fumigant would leave the island. Anyone in a boat that would go by and see what
we were doing would almost have a boating accident.

NARRATOR: After fumigating the island, they returned every
couple of weeks to check which species had come back. Today the old buddies
return to the site of their mini-apocalypse.

DANIEL
SIMBERLOFF (University of Tennessee):
Often, you could not take the boat right
up to the island because it was too shallow. So you'd anchor the boat and
wade through the water to the island. The problem here is that there are
blacktip sharks, lemon sharks and nurse sharks that hang out around these
mangrove islands. So we developed a method of hitting them on the head with an
oar when they come near you. And that keeps them away, although the blacktip
sometimes come back and you have to hit them twice.

ED
WILSON: I think this is just about...

DAN
SIMBERLOFF: I would say this is a six-ant-species
island.

ED
WILSON: I hope so. I hope so.

DAN
SIMBERLOFF: You get to the island—and
some of them are quite dense, especially on the outside, so you have to crawl
up into the roots from the little moat of water around it—and you have to
look over the entire island to see what insects are on them.

I
see my vision isn't what it was 40 years ago.

Aha!
Here's the silent bush cricket, Tapaliscalurida Okay, Ed, here's
this branch, and you'll see the antennae sticking out. There's the insect
right there in front of you.

Ah,
Xenomermex.

ED
WILSON: No kidding? Good. Bring it over here. I'm
going to get it under a magnifying glass.

NARRATOR: After several years of experimenting, they were
able to answer some fundamental questions about life on islands.

ED
WILSON: If you start out with a certain number of species
and then you remove them, all of them, and then you let other species come back
in, would they return to an equilibrium—that is, back to the same level,
and stay there—that they were at before you removed the old fauna? The
answer to that was they do. They come back at that level. The second question
we asked was, "Would it be the same species?" For the most part, no,
they were different species.

NARRATOR: This work provided important scientific evidence
to back Ed Wilson's campaign to preserve habitats for the world's
endangered species. It confirmed that the smaller the area of land, the fewer
the number of species it could support, and the higher the risk of extinction.

DAN
SIMBERLOFF: It's very relevant to
conservation. Before this work, I think people had this illusion that if we set
aside a little bit of habitat with three pairs of some endangered species
everything would be fine. I think it's captured very nicely when Ronald
Regan said, famously, "Well, you know, it's a redwood. How many
redwoods do you need?"

And
after this work was done, we could give some indication of how many individuals
we need.

It
doesn't matter on any one of these islands because the same species
occurs on other islands or on mainland
mangrove habitat, and sooner or later will re-colonize that site. But when we're
talking about national parks and other reserves, often there is no other site
where the population's present, so after that population goes extinct,
that's the end of it, the end of the lineage.

ED
WILSON: One of what's been called the "iron laws"
of ecology is that with every tenfold increase in habitat made available to
species, you double the number of species that can live there indefinitely, you
know, "sustainability." So this is one of the reasons why
conservationists have a sound scientific basis for trying to get larger
reserves. It's good insurance. I mean, we can save more species over the
long term.

NARRATOR: The world's species are not spread out
evenly. Around 50 percent are found on just two or three percent of the
Earth's surface. Some places, like the Dominican Republic, are rich in
species found nowhere else in the world and have been designated biodiversity
hotspots.

A
random sweep along a ridge in this tropical cloud forest yields all manner of
surprises. It's estimated there are thousands of undiscovered insect
species on this island alone.

MAN:
Whoa, that is a big roach! You smell that?

NARRATOR: To maintain such biodiversity, Ed Wilson has
become an active campaigner to protect what's left of the world's
endangered ecosystems.

MAN:
It's a cloudy day today, yeah? I hope you like
it.

ED
WILSON: I'm not sure I like it, but I know a lot of
the animals and plants like it.

NARRATOR: The Dominican Republic has been successful in
creating reserves. The same is not true of its neighbor on the island of
Hispaniola.

Viewed
from space, the human footprint is clearly visible. To the east is the
Dominican Republic; to the west is a brown wasteland, almost completely devoid
of trees. This is Haiti, a country so poor that many people flock across the
border in the hope of a better life.

Some
refugee families have settled illegally in Dominican nature reserves near the
border. Ed Wilson is about to confront the reality of economic versus
environmental survival. This family has chopped down trees to grow vegetables.
Their plight is desperate.

ED
WILSON: Hello. How are you?

HAITIAN
REFUGEE: Fine, and you?

ED
WILSON: Glad to meet you.

TRANSLATOR: Do you know you
are living in a park? A park that is owned by the state?

ED
WILSON: I suppose this is really a tragedy, and that they
have become what are called ecological refugees, that is, that things are so
tough in Haiti that almost any solution that they can find, including coming
over here, is going to be good for them.

And
I think, basically, from what they've told us, they understand that it's
wrong to be cutting down the forest. But they say, you know, "It's
just a little bit." That's, of course, the problem with the world
as a whole: we each want to take just a little bit. And they can't...they're
in a poverty trap. They can't solve this problem themselves. They need a
little bit of help to get out of that trap. This has to be nipped in the bud,
though, because, unopposed, it will just go on and on and on, and there won't
be any forest left. And we're too near the end of what's left of
the natural world.

NARRATOR: The islands of the Caribbean are among 34 biodiversity
hotspots around the world that represent the most threatened reservoirs of
plant and animal life.

Ed
Wilson believes that saving species from extinction in these places is an
easily solvable problem. In his view, it just needs rich countries to subsidize
these reserves, a relatively small price to pay.

ED
WILSON: All of $50 billion spread across the industrialized
world—maybe some of the developing countries who would benefit the most
adding a little of their own—one payment—and it could be spread out
over several years—that's chump change.

DAVID
ATTENBOROUGH: He'll go down as the
man who opened the eyes of millions round the world to the glories, the values,
the importance of, to use his term, biodiversity.

ED
WILSON: I've always been disturbed that we know so
little about the diversity of life on the planet. We know about 1.8 million
species— given a scientific name like homo sapiens—but we know that
the number could easily be 10 million and it could be as high as 100 million. We
don't know. Like nematode worms, microorganisms or fungi, the vast
majority of species we know, full well, have never been discovered.

It's
almost as though you were a doctor and you were trying to make a diagnosis and
a prognosis and so on about someone's illness, and you only knew 10
percent of the organs in the body. So there's a compelling need to
explore the planet. And there are lots of other reasons, too: all the various
new products that we could find, the new principles of biology that would
emerge. But how can we do this?

For
some 10 years now, I've been preaching—if I might use that good
Southern Baptist expression—the need to have a single access system for
collecting the information and organizing it. And I finally gave it a name in
2003. It was the Encyclopedia of Life. That
would be an electronic encyclopedia, which would consist of one page,
indefinitely extensible, for each and every one of the species of organisms on Earth—even
if it goes to 100 million—into which everything we know about that species,
everything, would be collected. And as new knowledge accumulated, that would be
added.

NARRATOR: Ed Wilson's dream of listing every living
species on the planet is now starting to be realized. The Smithsonian, Harvard
University and several other institutions are pooling their resources to create
a complete Encyclopedia of Life, with over 1.8 million entries.
Naturalists will be able to compare minute differences and to establish the
evolutionary pedigrees of any form of life. For Ed Wilson, it is the culmination
of a lifetime's fascination with the vast diversity of life, the
"macroscope" that he always wanted to go with his microscope.

CHILD: What's
that?

ED
WILSON: That's a carpenter ant. Ouch! He bit me! How
dare him

I
feel very fortunate to have reached 78 and to have spent— since I began,
really, as a 16 year old, doing serious science. You know, actually collecting,
identifying and getting information that was actually usable as science. I've
watched it go through the molecular period of a good part of half a century in
which biology was revolutionized, but in the course of which higher levels of
biology, dealing with organisms and ecosystems and classification and
biodiversity, were sidelined.

Now,
partly because of the developments in molecular biology, it's bought me
around full-circle. So that now, in my superannuated years, I'm
witnessing a tremendous surge upward of the fields that I began with.

NARRATOR: Ed Wilson has lived through several revolutions
in biology. Now, it seems, the DNA demons that haunted him in the '60s,
have been transformed into guardian angels, as genetics helps unravel
evolutionary history.

ED
WILSON: You know, if I could have my time again, I think I
would be a microbial ecologist. I would spend my time studying micro-organisms
in their natural environment. I'd cut my way through forests of bacteria
on a grain of sand. I would imagine myself in a submarine in a drop of water
that seemed as large as a lake, and for one more turn around, I would be an
explorer naturalist in a new world.

NARRATOR: On NOVA's Lord of the Ants
Web site, hear from E.O. Wilson on how a pivotal childhood experience helped
shape his career. Find it on PBS.org.

Major funding for NOVA is provided by David H.
Koch. And...

Discovering new knowledge: HHMI.

Major funding for Lord of the Ants is provided by the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund.
Additional funding is provided by Gordon and Betty Moore and by the Invitrogen
Educational Foundation. And by the following:

Major funding for "Lord of the Ants" is provided by the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund. Additional funding is provided by the Invitrogen Educational Foundation, Gordon & Betty Moore, the Morehead Planetarium & Science Center at UNC, the Teach Green Foundation, and the Nurture Nature Foundation

National corporate funding for NOVA is provided by Cancer Treatment Centers of America.
Major funding for NOVA is provided by the David H. Koch Fund for Science, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and PBS viewers.